Prayers for the Living (12 page)

You're shaking your head. You're speechless.

But he told me what the pigeon said to him. And he felt faint, everything went black, and the next thing he knows he's back out on the street, walking toward our building. He was, at this time, let me see . . . fourteen. And he didn't tell me, not then. Later. Usually I've been telling you what I didn't know until later. But here I wanted you to see that for years I lived in ignorance of my son's thoughts
and needs. Only later did he begin to tell me everything. When he started writing letters from the school in Cincinnati, that's when it started, the telling of the truth. This first time with the vision he kept it secret, to me at least. The old rabbi he told. But not his mother. No. This was before the news came from Cincinnati. Years before. And then came the offer.

“Oh, you're going too fast. You're making time fly. Like the pigeons you're making it, Minnie.”

“So can you tell me where did the years go, anyway? I wish only they had nested up on the roof like the pigeons. Then we could visit them. Then we could see.”

“It moves so fast.”

“It moves fast all right. It moves like those movies you see sometimes on the television, the ones about growing flowers, all speeded up, and clouds sometimes, clouds moving so fast it looks like the world is spinning away.”

“Time stopper they call it. I remember from Rick my grandson's school.”

“Not time stopper, Mrs. Pinsker. Time stoppage. The world spins, the clouds rush along, the flower grows, one two three four five.”

“Stopper, stoppage. It moves, don't it? It spins so fast. And now you got to wait a minute for me. It's my turn for the bathroom.”

“Some things you can't stop,
nu
?”

S
O
,
MORE ABOUT
the birds?

More about the bird: another bird. The second time this happened he had just fought his battle with the rabbi about the offer to attend school in Cincinnati. “You want to go to the Union of All Hebrews?” The old man had raised his voice full of taunt and disparagement. “This is a school for goyim. Classes they have in English. You want to study Talmud in English? Go read a comic book, boychick.”

He reached over to pinch Manny's cheek, but the boy ducked. “You want to read a comic book? Go 'head, go 'head.”

“I'm sure they read in Hebrew,” Manny said.

“Goyim can learn Hebrew, too. Does that make them good Jews?”

“I'm not a good Jew. I'm a good student.”

The humped-up little man clapped his hands to his face and slid back in his chair. Here in this greenish light of the basement office my Manny always felt as though he were sitting in a fishbowl. And here was the big fish squirming at the antics of the little.

“You're a good student. But you're stubborn like your father.”

“Please don't talk about my father. What's this got to do with my father?”

“What's it got? It's got plenty.”

“It's got nothing to do with my father,” Manny said.

“It doesn't?” the old man said. “It most certainly does. It has to do with saving your father. Your father died like a goy and you're helping to make him a Jew. Who knows where he is now, his soul, spinning around and around in the smoke, burning in Gehenna, because he died like a goy on the Sabbath, and praying, he is praying, you will help to make him leave his pain. Do you understand? And you go to Cincinnati, go to study with the goyish Jews, the Jews who aren't Jews, and he'll spin around another thousand years, because what's time to him when he died the way he died? So you'll go, and he'll spin, and he'll burn, and he'll . . .”

“You're crazy,” Manny told him, enjoying the full breath of their argument. “You don't talk like a rabbi, you talk like a priest.”

“A what?”

“You heard me.” Manny stood up.

“A what?”

“You heard me.”

“Get out, you forsaken little bastard,” the old man said. “Out!” He stood up and waved a hand at the boy. “Out!”

“I'm not a bastard,” Manny said, moving toward the door.

“Your father died like a goy!” the old man said. “And you're a stinking little bastard not worth my time.” And this man hurled
his miserable little body at Manny and struck him on the shoulder. “Out!”

“Don't do that to me!” Manny said. And he without thinking slapped the little old man on the side of the head and knocked him against his desk. Books flew everywhere, pencils, pads, pens, ink bottles went flying.

Out the door, up the steps to the street, running back toward our building, Manny kept going. If at that hour I had been home already, and not still working my fingers to the bone at the shirt factory, I would have heard the downstairs door fly open and slam shut behind him, and I would have heard him pump his legs, pump, pump, pump his way up the stairs, all the way up to the fourth floor, fifth, past our door, and up again, higher, to the sixth. And he's climbing, not only climbing stairs, he's climbing years, he's going back in time and he's going ahead in years, pump, pump, pump, pump go his legs, his heart, and he's thinking, Papa! and he's thinking, you worked! You worked so hard! And he's thinking, how could he say that? that rotten old bastard, that slump! And he's thinking, he's helped me, helped me so much, but how could he say that? How? How? And he's reached the top floor, and he's wrenching open the door to the roof, and he's thinking, what for? What for? Oh, Papa, Papa, and he's feeling as though his heart has been drained of blood, now an empty shell, now an empty bottle, a cracked, shattered glass bottle of a heart, and he reaches into his pocket, and he feels the shard, and he stops short of the edge, looks down, breathing, breathing, and looks up, looks around at a sound, sees Arnie's pigeon coop, hears the cooing and gurgling of the nesting birds, and he steps back from the edge, catches his breath, the brat, I would have said if I could have seen him then, the little brat, daring the air beyond the edge to lift him somewhere without pain, daring it, saying, I dare you, lift me, I'll leap into your arms, you air! and finally, stepping back again, back again, and lifting his head to the horizon, seeing the spires of the greater city beyond the flat roofs of our neighborhood, looking east toward the river where our boat first docked,
southeast toward that island, that pier in the bay, and west toward Cincinnati from where the call had come, and north again to the greater city, the towers, the spires. Hands in his pockets, fingers of one hand curled around the shard, breathing hard, still breathing hard, and the stink of the street rising up to his nostrils, the stink of the pigeons in his nose. A wind coming up from the river. Heat of the roof in the late afternoon sun. Sun sloping toward the west. The street below, throbbing beneath his eye, the street beating like a heart—
thunka-tunk, thunka-tunk,
calling up to him, saying, want me? Want me?

It happened then. Again. It happened first as a speck in the sky, first a speck, then a bird swooping up and then swerving around, and stooping down toward the neighborhood, past the higher roofs, toward our roof, the pigeon from on high, swerving in toward him, fixing its eye on him as it floated past, and opening its beak to say,
You want to be both rich and blessed?
as it sailed past on its broad, white wings untouched by city soot.

“I d-do,” stuttered Manny to himself aloud.

Follow me then,
the bird said, turning around and swinging by the western side of the roof again, then swooping up over his head and swinging past the sun, making a shadow as it swerved past the sun, and then down again, toward the south side, and around again, where it feathered its wings and landed atop the coop.

You want?
it asked him.

He knew the voice. He fell to his knees.

“I want.”

Then, I say, follow me,
it told him, cocking its head first to one side, then the other.

“Where?” Manny asked.

Where?
the voice said.
Where? Watch!

And now the other birds inside the coop fluttered their wings all at once, all together, like a chorus line waving arms, legs, and then like an orchestra behind a solo singer the birds commenced to coo and gurgle and bleat and bleep and blutter-bluster, birdlike, birdlike, but loud, louder than he had ever heard, and the pure
white bird, who spoke with his father's voice, gave a flutter, gave a shudder, and pushed itself off into the air from the roof of the coop, soaring higher, higher toward the west. And soon it was no more than a moving object as large as his hand, and then as small as his thumbnail, and then as tiny as a dot on a clean white piece of paper, and then it was gone.

My Manny lingered awhile on the roof before he realized that he was still on his knees, kneeling. So then he arose and walked slowly toward the door, and he descended slowly the height of the entire building, down the flight after flight of steps to the street, and he met his friend Arnie on his way out of the building, and Arnie took one look at him and bumped up against the side of the hall.

“Oh, my God!” he said and nearly dropped his clarinet case.

That night, I was stirring the soup, and in the door comes Manny, his hair turned almost completely white.

“T
HAT
'
S HOW HE
got his white?”

“That's how. White as snow from that day on. Except for the little dark streak down one side. They missed that part.”

“They?”

“You know. Whatever. The way it turned. It turned all over except for that little streak.”

“It looks very becoming. I always thought that.”

“It makes him look distinguished now. But at sixteen it didn't seem that way. I worried he might be upset.”

“You took him to a doctor?”

“Why should I have done that? He wasn't sick. He was scared. His hair changed. This doesn't happen every day, but it doesn't mean he's a sick person. In fact, after this happened he seemed to me a lot happier. ‘Mama,' he said, ‘I have made up my mind. I'm going to the Union of All Hebrews. I'm going to get myself a good education and I don't care what name anybody puts on it.'”

“A smart boy.”

“He was always a smart boy. He was always smart. But I worried, you know, I always worried about just how smart he was.”

“Ladies?”

“Oh, you surprised me. You sneaked up so quiet I didn't even suspect.”

“More coffee, ladies?”

“More coffee, of course. Mrs. Pinsker?”

“For me, sure, I'll have coffee, thank you, yes.”

The waitress stepped back from the table.

“I don't need it. Already I've got a coffee lake inside me. But I don't want to hurt her feelings.”

“That's why you drink more coffee?”

“That's why I'm drinking this cup. She's very nice. She caters to us.”

“She has nothing better to do with her time. It's not so busy now just before dinner.”

“It's that late?”

“It's that late.”

“After this cup I should go home and make dinner. But tonight I could be a little late. I eat with nobody but myself.”